Eos will install one of its zinc-air batteries with 36
kilowatt-hours of storage capacity at a Con Edison facility in
New York City, according to Philippe Bouchard, the closely held
company’s director of business development. The project will be
Eos’s first to provide backup power on the electrical grid and
precedes larger installations planned with Con Edison, other
utility owners and independent power producers, Bouchard said
today in a telephone interview.

Grid-scale energy storage is a “multi-hundred billion
dollar market opportunity,” he said. “There’s such an obvious
problem that has yet to be addressed by a product in the market,
and that is fundamentally how do we decouple supply and demand
on the electricity grid?”

Eos, based in New York City, is developing batteries for
grid-scale and transportation applications, and its systems will
be designed to last as long as 30 years, Bouchard said. The
company expects as many as six partners, including “a cross
section of the largest utilities in Europe and the U.S.,” to be
testing its batteries next year, Chief Executive Officer Michael
Oster said Feb. 8 in an interview.

Price Threshold

The company plans to sell its grid-scale systems for $160 a
kilowatt-hour, which would make them “cost competitive with gas
peaking plants and copper wire used for transmission and
distribution upgrades,” Bouchard said. “Batteries get really
interesting at around $300 per kilowatt hour, that’s where they
can compete with these incumbent technologies, but our goal is
to significantly cross that price threshold.”

The $500,000 project is funded by a $250,000 grant from the
New York Research and Development Authority that must be matched
by private funds, Bouchard said. The agency today also awarded
about $1.15 million to five additional companies developing
energy storage systems, including Watt Fuel Cell Corp.,
Electromotive Designs LLC, Custom Electronics Inc., Bettergy
Corp. and Battery Energy Storage Systems Technologies LLC.